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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • And Obama broke the legal Occupy Wall Street protests and killed civilians in Yemen with drone strikes. So he takes the title instead? “Most progressive” is a comparative qualification, and he does not need to BE a progressive to take the title.

    While I agree that the strike shouldn’t have been broken and that the rail workers should have the right to stop as much work as they control in order to make their demands heard, Biden also became the first president to walk a picket line during that strike and ultimately got the rail workers a deal that their unions all were reportedly happy with. He may not be everything you want, but he IS the most pro-union president of my lifetime. Again, not a high bar to clear. Recognize progress when it happens, even if it’s not your dream come true.

    Furthermore, with all the terrifying examples of actual rising fascism that surround us right now, don’t muddy the waters with BS like that. It just makes you look like a troll.







  • I guess it depends on what you’re using Mint for, but I’ve been getting a lot of use out of Empower (formerly Personal Capital) for tracking all my accounts in one place. No subscription or anything, just some pressure, sometimes including phone calls, to use their financial advisor services.

    I’ve had an account with Credit Karma for ages and I’m not sure what service they offer that would be comparable, but they were bought by Intuit a few years ago, so I’d find it hard to recommend them for much anymore.


  • This is the correct answer. All of the replies saying to use Firefox/support FOSS are missing the point. Once Google rolls this out and promotes it as higher security and guaranteed ad impressions, it will become the standard because all of the websites you want to use will opt in. It won’t do you much good to keep using Firefox when your bank, your employer/school, and every news/weather/sports site you try to use require a Google-verified, ad-displaying browser. It’s not our choice to make, and that’s the point of doing it this way.

    I’d go one cynical step further to say that once they have complete control over how pages are displayed on your end, they’ll roll out a subscription for ad-free* browsing, which will eventually include ads anyway a couple years down the road.


  • That’s pretty cool. Of course Christopher Nolan would insist on editing on film. I bet Tarantino and a few others would as well. In the case of laser printing vs optical printing, he’s probably right, especially at IMAX scale. And you’re absolutely right that he’s choosing it because it’s the highest possible fidelity, whereas someone like Tarantino chooses film for sentimental, kitsch, and artistic reasons. Apparently digital IMAX is still only about 4k at best. In the audio world though, analog DACs really are perfect reproduction many times beyond what is perceptible in sound. Compared to cutting to vinyl from tape, or even transferring from tape to tape, digital is orders of magnitude higher fidelity to the source signal. There’s lots of reasons to love analog audio, but higher measurable fidelity is not among them.



  • Despite being what a lot of analog fetishists focus on, a purely analog editing chain is not necessarily what causes the effects that they actually like about analog media. Most of it comes from the playback media itself. In the case of vinyl records, there’s mastering techniques that have to be used to make sure the needle stays in the groove that some people feel sound better. There’s minute harmonic distortions that people prefer over the perfectly clear and clean sound of digital. In the case of film payback, you have actual image frames being flashed on the screen. You have shutter dwell where no image is shown at all while the next frame is being advanced. You’d never consciously notice the flicker, but it affects the way you perceive the image and the motion on the screen. Film can have very high contrast and there may also be minor differences in color profile due to being displayed by pigments rather than being created digitally. Most digital media these days is technically far superior to it’s analog counterpart. It just happens that it’s the limitations and artifacts of the analog media that some people find pleasing.